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Idea #10341: Physical Geography



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Written by Studi8 the 26 Jun 08 at 15:58. Category: Education.
Related to: Edubuntu. Status: New
Description
Teaching Physical Geography is mostly boring to the students. A nice tool which visualises physical geographical items would be a killer application for edubuntu.

- Earth, moon and sun to teach how seasons, day/night and the moon phases work.

- Focused on earth a tool which allows to visualize athmospheric processes, erosion, tectonics...
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poflaco wrote on the 26 Jun 08 at 16:09
Marble may be good for this, if not maybe try to find out if they can add more features.

Studi8 wrote on the 26 Jun 08 at 17:19
Marble is useful to show the eart's surface, but there's no sun nor moon, nor movement or any physics system. I think this would be too much to change.

For education marble also needed more information layers like country names, streets, economical information...

tackat wrote on the 26 Jun 08 at 20:39
- Marble already does sun shading in Marble 0.5 (for the KDE 4.1 release which is due in a month).
- Marble also has support for stars
- Marble also has support for country names since Marble 0.4
- Support for OpenStreetMap is already in current SVN of Marble 0.5 - which means that it will get released together with KDE 4.1.

- Adding the sun and the moon shouldn't be particular hard. Patches are appreciated :)

Torsten Rahn,

Marble Team

Eldmannen wrote on the 26 Jun 08 at 20:40
Yeah, might be needed for the stupid Americans.
They are so stupid, they don't even know where their own country is on a map.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=V3eS1zwfZQ0

Studi8 wrote on the 27 Jun 08 at 05:46
@Torsten

Great to hear that. As an paedagogics student I can't code, I hope I can contribute this way.

To teach seasons it would be needed to have:
- some viewing positions like from top, side, earth, following earth
- information layers like angles, ecliptic, earth orbit
- controls for the movement and spin of the earth
- visualisation of day&night (nightview is a great map you've implemented)
- visualisation of sun intensity on earth

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O9hawBb3wbk
http://youtube.com/watch?v=taHTA7S_JGk

Also very useful were information layers of the tectonic plates at some times of earth's history (now, Paleogene, Cretaceous...)

Or climatic maps like here: http://klimadiagramme.de/Karten/klimakarten.html

layers which show statistical data like: density of inhabitants, BIP, natural resources...

I know it is a big whishlist, I hope you can use some of it.

Eldmannen wrote on the 27 Jun 08 at 10:33
Torsten,
Yeah that would be pretty cool.


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